Cicinnurus
sih-sin-NOO-rus
Genus
(the one with) a curly tail — alluding to the two elongated, coiled wire-like central tail feathers of the male King Bird-of-Paradise
Literally: curly tail
| Part | Meaning | Language | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| cicinn- | a curl of hair | Greek (cicinn, -o, =us) | combining form cicinno-; the -o- connecting vowel merges with the initial vowel of the following root |
| -o- | connecting vowel (elided before the initial vowel of -our-) | Greek combining-vowel -o-; written here as the 'u' in -urus absorbs it, but the join is standard | |
| -ur- | the tail | Greek (our, =a) | Greek οὐρά (ourá); stem our- used before the nominative ending; the diphthong ou is simplified to u in the Latin orthography of the name |
| -us | nominative singular masculine ending | New Latin | standard New Latin genus ending giving the word masculine grammatical gender |
Cicinnurus is a compound Greek noun fully Latinized as a second-declension masculine noun in -us. It joins cicinn(o)- ('curl of hair', combining form) directly to our-a ('tail'), with the connecting -o- eliding before the following vowel, yielding cicinn + our + us → Cicinnurus. There is no specific epithet; this is a genus-only name. The name is a noun in apposition describing a distinctive physical feature of the type species, the King Bird-of-Paradise (Cicinnurus regius), whose male bears two elongated, spirally coiled central rectrices.
Pronunciation
- sih-sin-NOO-rus Penult stress, Rule 4: the penult vowel is 'u' followed by a single consonant (r), and most penults whose vowel is u take penult stress.
Other readings
A purely adjectival reading 'curl-haired' (cicinn + -urus as 'tailed') is also valid, but the zoological context — the coiled tail wires — makes 'curly-tailed' the overwhelmingly preferred interpretation.
Both roots (cicinn and our) are confirmed in the dictionary. The diphthong ou of Greek οὐρά (ourá) is conventionally written as simple u when embedded inside a Latin-orthography compound, hence -urus not -ourus; the same convention appears in, e.g., Brachyurus, Macrourus. Cicinnurus is the genus of birds of paradise established by Vieillot (1816); its most familiar species is Cicinnurus regius, the King Bird-of-Paradise. Availability of the name in a zoological registry (ZooBank) should be verified if any nomenclatural work is intended.